Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Getting around the Blogger Photo Limit

There is a quick and easy way to stop having issues with the new guidelines. And, as an added benefit it will make you a more responsible blogger to boot.

So . . . if you do not want to change your practices you can upload your massive photos to a photo hosting site, like photobucket or flickr, but honestly that is a stop-gap measure. You will quickly fill up your space if you are a craft blogger with many photos per post. Additionally, it is a pain in the butt because you lose the batch upload feature, because you have to copy and paste every link to every photo.

You could also pay the $2.50 a month to have extra storage space in google. However, as much as I like blogging, I don't have the traffic to advertise to cover this expense, and I really love the idea of having a free blog. Anyways, what this post covers lets you keep the free blog, with minimal expense in time.

What you really need is a way upload photos that are the small enough. And you need an interface that seamlessly allows you to resize your photos in batches.

If you have an XP computer (like my ancient laptop of great awesomeness) the Image Resizer Powertoy is the way to go. Install this little widget, highlight the photos you want to shrink to a web friendly size (ie 800 pixels or less), right click, and the resize photo option is there to click.

The powertoy for Vista/7x is not as well developed in terms of bonus features, but it does have all of the same functionality.

Step 1: Highlight the photos you want to shrink and right click on a highlighted photo. A new option is available, resize pictures

Step 2: Enter the size of pictures you want

I chose custom. You want the pictures to have the same aspect ratio as the original, which is 4:3. I forgot to click the only shrink photos check box. You don't want to enlarge photos that are smaller 800 pixels in the largest dimension. That really decreases the quality of the photo.

Step 3: Admire your small photo

The small photo will have a tweaked name ie (Custom) or (Small) or (Medium). Make sure you upload the photos with the modified names.

So, what are the benefits?

1.) You are at the 800 pixel mark for your largest dimension. You can now use the normal blogger loading interface, and upload as many photos as your little heart desires.

2.) Blogger only uploaded 2048 pixel maximum dimension photos before. So your photos were shrunk before anyways. This just formalizes the fact that your camera takes much larger photos than is reasonable to upload.

3.) Your small photo is taking 3.67% of the space as the original. Mine was 5,936,218 bytes, now it is 217,867 bytes. This is why google doesn't want to store all of your massive images. Resizing photos is the responsible way to use space on the internet. You can now store 24 photos in the space you stored 1 photo.

4.) Preshrunk photos are much more crisp and pretty than blogger shrunk photos. A computer application can take up more room than a web interface, so the application has more tricks it can do from a signal processing standpoint to keep the quality of your photo high than something built into a website.

5.) You can now easily create custom sized photos and just upload them as original size in blogger. Say, you want a 450 pixel wide photo, it is super easy to set up. You don't need to open it in paint, or even photo editing software. You just highlight, right click, enter your size, and click resize. For one to infinite photos at once.

6.) 800 pixels is generally bigger than the width of a blog, so you can still use the small, medium, large, and extra large options when you add photos to your blog. There will be no change in how you blog, or insert photos into your blog.

So I hope I have convinced you that this is the quickest, easiest, and most responsible way to upload photos to your blogger blog. Feel free to ask questions in the comments, and I will edit this blog entry for clarity based on your feedback. I hope this can be a resource for those who are frustrated about the new rules.